Anarchist Quotes
Anarchist Quotes

Authors List
Authors List


Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin, Pioneering Social Ecologist

Murray Bookchin was born on January 14, 1921, in Bronx, New York, United States. He grew up in the revolutionary ferment of the 1930s, influenced by his Russian immigrant grandmother, a Socialist Revolutionary. During his early adulthood, Bookchin worked in foundries and auto plants and was a trade union organizer. He studied at the Workers' School near Union Square, and later joined the Communist youth organization. However, during the 1950s, he broke with Stalinism and turned to libertarian socialism, resolving himself to the vision of a decentralized, ecological society. He worked extensively throughout his life on ecological issues within the framework of this social philosophy, trying to reconcile the demands of liberty with the imperatives of ecological survival. Bookchin died on July 30, 2006.

Bookchin's philosophies and beliefs centered around social ecology and libertarian municipalism, concepts that combined the ideas of anarchism, ecology, and libertarianism to address societal and ecological issues. His pioneering book 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism' and later works became seminal readings for the anti-authoritarian left and the emerging ecology movement. He played a crucial role in presenting a new vision of radical politics, combining the best of traditional socialism with insights from ecology, and a powerful critique of existing social relations.


Date of Birth: 1921-01-14

Date of Death: 2006-07-30

Country of Birth: United States

Political Ideas: Libertarian Socialism, Social Ecology

Quotes Available: 23



Quotes by Murray Bookchin

Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not mass liberation or class liberation behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.
It is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.
There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.
We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.
The great majority of people have to work in order to earn a livelihood, and a sizable proportion of them are productive workers. A huge number of workers are unproductive as well. They operate entirely with the circumstances and framework created by the capitalist system, such as shuffling invoices, contracts, credit slips, insurance policies, and so forth. Probably nine out of ten "workers" wouldn't have any work to do in a rational society - one that would not require insurance or any other commercial transactions.
The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena - such as technology or population growth - for growing environmental dislocations.
Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems.
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as that of hierarchy itself.
I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment - individual liberty. That's what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.
Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics - notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.
What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life.
When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom.
Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists.
The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.
Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner.
Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.
The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.
Our being is becoming, not stasis. Our science is utopia, our reality is eros, our desire is revolution.